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In his family's bedroom - behind a locked and sealed door, to deter prying grandmothers - Sasori of Sunagakure sat on the wide bed where he had slept all his life, with his mother and father on either side of him for the last time.
He gathered them up on his strings and tugged them both in close, letting their smooth-worn wooden arms embrace him. Mother's hair, thinning now, tickled his nose; Father's chest pressed against his shoulder, and he closed his eyes and held them, feeling the memories stored in the wood and wires of their bodies. All the familiar details of their construction; all the comfort he'd ached for as a lost and lonely child.
He was a chūnin and a puppeteer of the kugutsubutai now, not a child any longer. And he loved these two but he'd loved them threadbare, and he knew that if he started tinkering too much with such early work, he'd ruin them. The wear and tear of his younger self's affection, the clumsy shaping and imperfect alignments that he hadn't known better than at the time, were part of these puppets and it would tear out their souls if he tried to repair them to his current standards.
So instead, given how fragile they were getting, it was time to let them rest. He hugged each of them in turn, thinking how much smaller and lighter they felt now that he was growing up; I love you, he whispered through his strings, and felt the subtle echoes of their affection in reply. Puppets naturally loved you back in proportion to how much love you gave them, and these two adored him.
But they were frail, and weaponless because they were never built for any other purpose than to love and be loved, and his life was a dangerous one now and he didn't want them anywhere near the front line of it. Their originals had gone out to war and never come home.
Sasori wouldn't let that happen to these ones.
He'd put his whole heart into the decorated scroll box in his lap, and the two matching puppet scrolls that lay inside it. He'd inked love into every line of the seals, carved protection into each curl and flourish of the fine imported wood. They would be able to sleep here undisturbed, safe and cherished, wrapped forever in the echoes of his love for them.
He began by sealing Father, rolling up the first scroll and pressing it to his heart while he nestled one more time into Mother's embrace. She held him close, her brittle fingers gentle in his hair, and his eyes burned. It took him a long, painful moment to pull himself away from her arms.
But finally he released her and sealed her into the second waiting scroll. He hugged both scrolls tightly, and then tucked them into their slots in the carved box. Closed the lid, activated the protective seals; secured the lock with a tweak of his strings to the inside of the complex mechanism. Hugged the box.
Then, slowly, still reluctant despite knowing it had to be done, he slipped the box into the middle drawer of the cabinet beside the bed. "Sweet dreams," he whispered, with a final touch to the lid. "I love you."
And he closed the drawer; and then had to turn around and pull Karasu onto the bed with him and cling to his battle-puppet with all four of Karasu's arms around him and his face buried in Karasu's ragged hair, because his heart hurt. He knew he was doing the right thing for them and that they were still there, where he could get them out again if he wanted to, but sealing them away had still felt too much like a farewell.
Like a puppet funeral.
Sasori hated funerals, and he never wanted to go to one again.
***
Those damned puppets were just about the worst thing Chiyo had ever had to deal with in her own house.
She was a puppeteer too. She'd done her own share of disturbing things in her time, because you didn't belong in the kugutsubutai in the first place if you weren't comfortable with the monstrous, the morbid and the macabre. But seeing those undead, uncanny echoes of her son and daughter-in-law as they clicked and skulked around the house, regularly finding them flanking a sleeping Sasori with their wooden fingers curled over his narrow shoulders... it was too much.
It had been one thing when the loss was still fresh, and she had foolishly indulged Sasori when he first made them, but it had been the better part of four years. How was she supposed to put her only son's death into the mental lockbox where it belonged and move on when she kept seeing his artificial ghost out of the corner of her eye? How was Sasori supposed to learn a shinobi's detachment if he filled the holes in his heart with eerie doppelgangers instead of letting them close up? Broken bonds were a fact of shinobi existence, and Sasori needed to accept that. There were always going to be wars, always going to be deaths.
Did he think he could make puppets of everyone he was going to lose for the rest of his life?
She hadn't seen those two horrors around for a little while, though. She'd noticed her stomach starting to uncramp, realised she'd gone a few days without feeling the permanent knot in it jerk tight whenever she glimpsed red hair in a doorway or a flitting dark shadow across the window. Every time she'd seen Sasori this week he'd had Karasu escorting him instead, the four-armed battle-puppet draped on his back and peering suspiciously over his shoulder.
And that was much less disturbing, because Karasu at least looked like a proper puppet and not like the ghost of anyone she loved. "Ne, Sasori-chan," she ventured over dinner, as Sasori sat and carefully picked out the one kind of bean he didn't like from the mixed rice she'd made. "What happened to Mother and Father? I've only seen you with Karasu lately."
He didn't look up to reply, his face and voice blank. The only sign of emotion he offered her was a clicking roll of Karasu's eyes. "They were old and wearing out. I put them away."
"You're not going to repair them?" She hoped she wasn't putting ideas in his head by asking.
A shrug that made Karasu shift on his shoulder, the puppet's toothy, wild-haired head lolling against Sasori's own. "I don't want to."
"All right." Good, she meant. Maybe he was finally overcoming his grief.
It would be so much better for him, indeed for both of them, if he could just accept that you didn't get a choice in this world about letting go.